The blog of D. Linda Garcia, PhD

Fleeing the heat and power outage in Washington DC, we threw our belongings into the car, and headed north to our lake-side cottage in the New Jersey Highlands. Although we arrived late at night, I knew my whereabouts, so familiar were the smells of the forest and the croaking of the frogs. All night long I paced from window to window, anticipating what the morning would bring.

At long last, the sun peeked over Sparta Mountain, slowly encroaching on the dark. I watched as it mounted higher and higher in the sky, casting a delicate glow across the lake. This was my cue. Out the door I raced to meet up with my friends Atticus and Lucy, who live next door, on the far side of the cove in the house on the hill.

But, whoa, what should I encounter there instead–a junior black bear meandering down to the water’s edge in search of a cool drink. Although I am part Plott Hound, bred to hunt bear and wild boar, I grasped the opportunity to retreat upon hearing my Mistress’s entreating call. The bear appeared to welcome the intervention as well, as he sauntered, as if he had no cares in the world, back the way he had come.

Sauntering Bears (courtesy of Wally Wentink)

With safe passage assured, I scooted up the hill, there to be greeted by my friends, Atticus and Lucy. Atticus is a handsome dude, with enough character and charm to land him a spot in a Walt Disney movie. Lucy is much more reticent, but her urge to play overcomes her shyness. Rescued from the same part of North Carolina that I was, she is my look-a-like from head to toe.

my look-a-like Lucy (DLG)

That’s just the beginning of my day.

Atticus a Cool Dude

Life, here, is so full, it seems that the days of summer are flying by. Just imagine my routine.After breakfast, I accompany my Master and Mistress on their daily walk to the end of the road, where I encounter my other friend, the English Retriever Martha (Mudwallow)–so named because she loves to wallow in the mud.

martha and me (DLG)

Eager to play, Martha brings me a stick, which we snatch from one another as we race together down the road. Then, back home, we play a game of peek-a-boo, each of us trying to surprise the other as we sneak around and around the car. Then, to cool off, we dive into the lake, where we swim and nose around in the shallows.

Blossom’s water games

Later in the day I might romp again with Atticus and Lucy, as they take off into the woods in hot pursuit of the local critters of which there are a number– few–bears, coyotes, deer, chipmunk, otter, ground hogs, and a stray cat or two. When the dogs aren’t around, I play with the children. who are most accommodating. Sometimes we pretend we are pirates aboard a ship (a large fallen tree) lodged in the cove. Other times, I swim along as they paddle out to the island, where they play other delightful fantasy games.

Tired Dog (DLG)

By evening time, I am all tuckered out. As a finale, I enjoy the snacks during cocktail hour, and try to make out the grownup conversations, but then, as the the witching hour arrives, and the sky turns pink, I can do no more. As I succumb to the call of the katydids and the trumpeting of the frogs. I close my eyes and happily remind myself that I live the life of a dog.

Tea Party Republicans want to roll back government, eliminate regulation, overthrow Obamacare, privatize education and social security. Romney’s Solution: outsource government! Too bad we can’t outsource the problems that government was established to address.

. Old adages die hard. Just consider the longevity of Adam’s Smith characterization of the self-regulating market as an invisible hand in his classic work, The Wealth of Nations. As Smith opined, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

This sentiment, a persistent trope reverberating from one generation to the next, has become a center-piece of the American ethos as well as a mainstay of the Republican party. Nowhere is this more evident than in the on-going Republican electoral campaign. Thus, it is only by invoking the mantra of the invisible hand that Romney can criticize President Obama’s economic strategy, and get away with it, without having to lay out a strategy of his own. He claims to have the magic formula! So, instead of policy ideas, we hear the old refrain, “what’s good for business is good for the country,” or as updated by Romney, “What’s good for Bain is good for the economy.”

The Tooth Fairy (courtesy of zazzle.com)

Call me a skeptic, but having faith in the invisible hand today seems no different to me than believing in the Tooth Fairy. After all, no one can seriously claim that bankers, investors, and equity firms, such as Bain, were not pursuing their own interests when the economy went belly up. How else to explain that big business magnates increased their wealth dramatically in the wake of the 2008 recession, while those lower on the rung experienced calamitous losses. But this begs the question: if businesses were doing what they are wont to do, why then did the market fail to regulate itself? Might this be black magic?

Perhaps is is time to forego the rhetoric of the Republican Party and take a hard look at Smith’s long-standing dictum. To date, neo-classical economists offer little hope in this regard: Try as they might, they have yet to explain how individual actions at the level of the butcher or the baker translate into macro level outcomes, whether good or bad. Fortunately, some nontraditional economists, viewing the economy from evolutionary and complexity perspectives, have provided some promising new insights.

Robert H. Frank, in his book The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good, addresses the issue of the invisible hand head on. As he contends, Darwin’s evolutionary theory, especially as it relates to the role of competition, is far more accurate about the nature of economic life than Adam Smith’s account’s in The Wealth of Nations. In Frank’s words:

When the ability to achieve important goals depends on relative consumption, as it clearly does in a host of domains, all bets regarding the efficacy of Adam Smith’s invisible hand are off. Notwithstanding the uncritically enthusiastic pronouncements of many of Smith’s modern disciples, unbridled market forces often fail to channel the behavior of self-interested individuals for the common good. On the contrary, as the pioneering naturalist Charles Darwin saw clearly, individual incentives often lead to wasteful arms races.

Combining the wisdom of evolutionary and complexity thinking, economist, Erik Beinhocker points out that the equilibrium outcomes, associated with the invisible hand, are entirely unrealistic. As he notes in his pathbreaking book, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics, the economy is not a static phenomena, but rather a dynamic, complex adaptive system, which is subject to oscillations, power laws, and phase transitions. Moreover, outcomes, as traditional economists would have us believe, are not the product of predictable linear processes; instead, they emerge from the bottom up as the result of the constant interactions and adaptations that take place at all levels of the system. Hence, policy interventions–be they Republican or Democratic–may play a role in determining outcomes, but they are only one factor in a myriad of influences on the economic system.

rough_seas (courtesy of adpulp.com)

When the economy is conceived in complex, evolutionary terms, the present economic crisis makes a certain amount of sense, unpleasant though it may be. However, what makes no sense at all, given the complexity of the economy, is to blame Obama for the present state of affairs, as Romney so flagrantly does. To the contrary, in times such as these, when the seas are rough and the future uncertain, what’s needed is not someone like Romney, who flips and flops floundering with the waves in the hope that equilibrium will naturally follow, but rather a captain, such as Obama, who will be steady at the helm and stay the course.

In the primary madness of the Republican Party, much is made of the cultural divide between urban supporters of Romney, and rural supporters of Santorum. Meanwhile, an equally, if not more, consequential clash is occurring, which has received far less public attention. This is the growing conflict between cultural and economic values, a tension that sociologist Daniel Bell first pointed out thirty six years ago, in his classic book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.

According to Bell, society consists of three realms–the political, economic, and cultural–each governed by differrent values and norms, or as he put it, axial principles. Looking ahead, he predicted that, as electronic technology enhanced the value of information in each of these realms, they would be brought into increasing conflict. Looking at how these conflicts might be played out in the policy arena, our OTA study concluded that:

The resolution of these issues in an information age will be more problematic. . . .Given the variety of opportunities that the new technologies afford, the increased value of information, changing relationships among the traditional participants in the intellectual property system, and rising expectations about the benefits of these technologies, the number of stake holders with disparate interests and competing claims on the system will be greater than ever before. In such a context, the granting of intellectual property rights, instead of mutually serving a variety of different stakeholders may actually pit one against another.

This theme has been developed from a variety of different angles over the last several years. For example, in his book, The Cultural Economy of Cities, Allen J. Scot, lays the groundwork for further discussion, describing how the economic and the cultural realms have converged: as he points out, today, economic products now have greatly enhanced semiotic value, whereas cultural goods are increasingly capitalized for sale. Taken together, these products comprise a rapidly growing portion of the nation’s economy, and–as Daniel Pink contends in his book Whole New Mind:Why Right Brainers Will Rule in the Future, they are the new source of America’s competitive advantage. Richard Florida would presumably agree, having argued in The Rise of the Creative Class that today’s creators now constitute a class in their own right.

Ironically, the predictions about a culture/economic clash would seem to have proven wrong. What has happened instead is the colonization of culture by the economic realm, a point that I make in my paper, Creativity: The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg. Whereas I make my case based on shifts in the architecture of the creative landscapes that allow economic actors to assume a defining role in the cultural realm, Lawrence Lessig draws a similar conclusion arguing from a legal standpoint. In his book, Free Culture he points out that, given the growing economic value of creative products, the danger today is that the laws governing the economy will come to encompass norms and activities associated with culture and creativity.

The Proof of the Pudding is in the public silence. The only place where one can see contention is in the Republican primary, where Santorum carries the banner of culture, while Romney touts economic profits.

Life, of course, is full of ironies, but what strikes me most recently as such is the coincidence between FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski‘s decision on August 22, 2011 to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine and the raging debate about Super Pacs brought on in part by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Communication Commission. This game-changing Supreme Court decision allows groups of people, including corporations, to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in support of a candidate, so long as there is no coordination with the candidate.

Free speech, it now seems, is no longer a constitutional right; but a matter of money. Those without, are in effect silenced. Scratching my head, I have to ask myself: What’s fair about that? Thanks to Stephen Colbert, the situation was brought into stark, as well as comic, relief when he parodied the new campaign finance rules, setting up his own Super Pac, Definitely Not Coordinated with Stephen Colbert Super Pac, and transferred it to his alter ego Jon Stewart.

Not that the Fairness Doctrine has been active over the past 20+ years. Put into place in 1949, the Doctrine was intended to assure that broadcasters not only made room for issues of public importance, but also aired contrasting perspectives. The rational behind the Government’s involvement in broadcasting–notwithstanding the Constitutional guarantee of free speech–was the industry’s use of scarce, public airwaves–a rationale that was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1969 decision Red Lion Broadcasting Co. vs FCC.

Televisions are Not Toasters (courtesy of ancient jars.com)

The subsequent expansion of media venues gradually weakened this rationale. In 1987, FCC Chairman Mark Fowler--famous for equating televisions with toasters–repealed the Fairness Doctrine, although it remained on the books until Chairman Genachowski’s recent decision to effectively eliminate it.

Paradoxically, today, while media outlets are plentiful, opportunities to raise one’s voice and be heard are becoming increasingly scarce. For, as Tim Wu has argued in The Master Switch, growth in media has led, time and time again, to vertical integration and greater industry concentration. Likewise, in his book The Myth of Digital Democracy, Michael Hindman illustrates how, as the number of outlets on the Internet grow, they become more and more concentrated in accordance with a power law. Hence, to gain a platform for expression under these circumstances requires having money, and lots of it.

To appreciate the full impact of this situation, one need only consider the frantic scrambling in the Republican Primary, not so much for votes but for dollars. As the contest shifts from backyard barbecues to the national media, and from policy pronouncements to negative advertising, the candidates chances of success are measured increasingly by the size of their Super PAC’S war chests. In fact, pointing to the $30.2 million that his Super Pac, Restore our Future, has raised, Mitt Romney has triumphantly predicted his own final victory.

Fierce competition, they say, is good for democracy, not just the market. Recent events make me question whether this is always the case. At the very least, this spending spree is wasteful: I can’t help thinking that the amount of money raised by the SuperPacs to promote–what more often than not is–false information far exceeds the meagre $23 million annual budget of the former Office of Technology Assessment, a Congressional agency tasked to seek out the truth, and one that Newt Gringrich, when Speaker of the House, helped to destroy. In his thoroughly engaging bookThe Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition and the Common Good,Robert H. Frank cautions against unbridled competition on more theoretical grounds. Employing Darwin as his frame of reference, he argues that such contests are likely to lead to an arms race, in which the winner may benefit in the short run, but the society will lose overall.

Sadly Frank’s scenario sounds all too familiar. With money now a proxy for speech, dialogue has become more and more vacuous, even as speech is no longer free. Could it be time for a new Fairness Doctrine?

Following the Republican Primary I feel that I am, much like Alice in Wonderland, trapped in a fantasy world full of bizarre happenings, none of which make any sense. “Curiouser and curiouser” is all I can say!

Like the unpleasant characters that Alice encounters along her way, the Republican candidates appear consumed by their own sense of importance. They contort their appearances, much like the Cheshire Cat, as they obfuscate and twist facts to suit the audience of the day. As Alice said to herself: “[They] look good natured, but [they] have very long claws and a great many teeth.” So behind the masks, Ron Paul the libertarian glad-hander is an angry bigot; Mitt Romney the conservative businessman is a closet social engineer; Gingrich the intellectual genius is unable to tell the truth; and Rick Perry the Christian preacher has forgotten about the word Love. Clearly, the candidates must have met the Duchess along the campaign trail, and taken her advice when she said:

Cheshire Cat (Disney)

Be what you would seem to be, or if you would like it put more simply–Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would appeared to have them to be otherwise.

Now then, how do we know where the truth lies? Certainly not by whose winning and losing. For just as Alice, upon drinking the potions and eating the mushrooms and cakes, vacillated abruptly from being ten feet tall to two inches small, so too the candidates, when imbibing the nectar of success, have had their sudden ups and downs.

The Queen of Hearts has the solution. A caucus, or better still a trial, she said. On the condition that there be no judges, Gingrich concurred. Quoting the Fury’s invitation to the mouse, he proposed:

Let us both go to law; I will prosecute YOU. . .Come I will take no denial; We must have

I'll be judge I'll be jury

a trial; For this morning I’ve nothing to do.’ Said the mouse to the cur, Such a trial, dear Sir, With no jury or judge would be wasting our breath.’ ‘I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury, Said cunning old Fury: ‘I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.’

Such nonsense can be very irritating, indeed. Like Alice I hope to wake up soon from this bad dream. Fortunately, Alice shows us the way out. Reaching the limits of her patience, Alice regains her true size and stature, and then, standing tall, she speaks the truth to absurdity.

Seven years my senior, my sister Judy was a role model for me. I loved just hanging around her. When she took up French, I tried to learn too. Her library books became my reading list. And when she starred in high school plays, I was her ardent fan, learning lines as she practiced them.

Most memorable of these was Agatha Cristy‘s play, And Then There Were None. (Known at the time by its politically incorrect title, Ten Little Indians.) Today, as I follow the Republican primaries, I am reminded of this marvelous mystery. For each day’s news events are every bit as suspenseful, dramatic, and unpredictable as those in Christy’s 1939 ‘who done it.’

The play’s plot centers around the mysterious deaths of 10 unrelated people who find themselves alone together on Soldier Island from which there is no escape. One by one, each is murdered, presumably at the hand of one among them, and in a sequence that mirrors the poem Ten Little Soldier Boys.

ten_little_indians_1965 (movie poster/ sharetv.org)

The tension mounts as each suspects the murderer to be among the others. The mystery remains unsolved as the last two visitors to the island suffer the same fate–and then there were none.

This puzzling chain of events is finally unravelled in an epilogue, thanks to the inspector who arrives on the island and pieces the clues together. It is not for me to spoil the story by recounting the elaborate explanation; as in any mystery, readers’ enjoyment comes from sorting it out for themselves. But I will take the opportunity of recalling Agatha Christy’s play to apply the Soldier Boy poem as a means of extrapolating about the totally unprecedented sequence of events and surreal atmosphere associated with the Republican Primary.

Ten Republican Candidates Seeking the Presidency.

republican debate

Ten Republic candidates standing in a line. Palin can’t commit, and then there were nine.

Nine presidential candidates starting at the gate. Perry forgets his script, and then there were eight.

Eight presidential candidates called upon by Heaven. Pawlenty is uninspiring, and so there were seven.

Seven presidential candidates performing all their tricks, Bachman failed her civics lesson, then there were six.

Six presidential candidates trying to stay alive, Huntsman was so principled the number dropped to five.

Five presidential candidates seeking an encore, Paul couldn’t get on stage and so there were four.

Four presidential candidates making policy, Cain’s diversionary tactics puts the number at three.

Three presidential candidates set on wooing you, Santorum doesn’t stand out, oops its now just two.

Mitt and Newt battle it out, just as in the play, when they are eliminated, Obama will have his day!

My mother, a young adult trying to get a handle on life in the chaotic thirties, was an avid reader of the works of social critic and Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis. His stories satirized the hypocrisy of the time, be it with respect to religion, capitalism, the bourgeoise, or politics. Happy to share her books with me, my mother introduced me to Sinclair Lewis one summer when I was confined to a chair on the screened-in porch of our Lake cabin, recovering from a nasty foot injury. Although an antsy teenager at the time, I was happy to stay put, enthralled as I was by Sinclair Lewis. Now, many years later, I find myself sitting on the same porch, in the same wicker chair, struggling, much as my mother had, to make sense of the politics of our times. Then, in a flash seemingly from nowhere, I recall Sinclair Lewis, and the story of Elmer Gantry.

Sinclair Lewis (findagrave.com)

To fully appreciate the book Elmer Gantry it is important to keep in mind the context in which it was written. The year was 1926, a time of tremendous social and political upheaval arising in the wake of the First World War, which took the form of mounting economic woes, labor strikes, and violent racial confrontations. Fueling these tensions was an underlying intense cultural conflict in which a rapidly growing and increasingly vocal evangelical movement pitted itself against raucous, flamboyant, urban moderns, who personified what came to be known as The Jazz Age.

These two movements fueled each other’s flames, and intensifed their rhetoric, raising the ante for both. The stakes were exceedingly high–nothing less than sin and salvation on the one hand vs. freedom and autonomy on the other.

As described by Barry Hankins in his charming book, Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today’s Culture Wars, the character Elmer Gantry, a narcissistic, opportunistic and–more often than not–ruthless Baptist (and later Methodist) preacher, epitomized the rise and confluence of these two seemingly contradictory social phenomena, which actually fed upon each other. An adherent of the evangelical tradition, Elmer preached the literal Bible; called for the renunciation of sin and salvation through a personal Jesus; advocated prohibition; and lambasted evolution. At the same time, Gantry’ behavior and rhetoric typified the individualist, anything goes, attitude of the roaring twenties. In contrast to his pious, dour colleagues, Gantry was a very charismatic figure; his revival meetings were major productions, exceptionally well marketed and carefully scripted and staged with music, costumes, props and gimmicks, all aimed to capture the hearts of wayward sinners. And not withstanding the many betrayals he carried out; the people whose lives he ruined; and the scandals in which he became involved; Elmer Gantry always came out on top. This cynical, no less than satirical, outcome might explain why the book was banned in Boston, and why, after its publication, Sinclair Lewis was threatened with imprisonment and death.

I had not thought about Elmer Gantry for years, that is, not until, late in the summer, when my husband read a newspaper article to me about Rick Perry. Perry, a Governor, had called upon Texans to pray for rain in their drought-ridden state. Not soon thereafter, and not long before the Iowa Straw Poll, and his presidential announcement, he hosted a ‘day of prayer,’which had all of the trappings of an evangelical tent revival. With God in his heart, he then sought to intimidate Ben Bernanke, by threatening to make life difficult for him if he were ever to come to Texas. On hearing this, I felt that I had met this guy before. But where? Of course; here again was Elmer Gantry. Didn’t Perry and Gantry both have the same modis operandi –charming on the outside, ruthless within. As telling, both are evangelicals first, citizens second. Both put religion over reason, leaving it to God to solve complex world problems, such as climate change. Both employ the Bible to dispute evolution. Both wear their religious faith on the sleeves, but rarely live up to it in their pugnacious, arrogant dealings with other people. Driven by their individual fervor, they both leave no holds barred.

In writing his satires, Sinclair Lewis intended not only to expose the hypocrisy underlying American society and culture, but also to make the country sit up and take notice, especially of the rising threat of fascism. His book, It Can’t Happen Here, reminds Americans that they too are subject to over simplifications, false promises, and rhetorical sway. The book tells the tale of how a a charismatic character, much like Elmer Gantry, or Rick Perry for that matter, might employ inflammatory rhetoric in the name of ostensibly religious goals to fool the public and build up a popular platform that can undermine democracy in the United States. Athough It Can’t Happen Here was written with rise of European dictatorships in mind, it is still a provocative read that can better help us understand the politics of today.

There is considerable irony in the fact that Tea Party groups have sought to legitimate their cause by choosing a name that evokes the Founding Fathers and the events that culminated in the writing of the Constitution and the birth of the Republic. For it is, in fact, these politicos who have conjured up and propagated a totally slipshod account of early American history. Of course, history is open to interpretation, and reinterpretation, but not to distortion of the facts. As Cass Sustein emphasizes in his book Republic.com 2.0, what’s alarming about today’s historical expediency is that, for many undiscerning people, it fills a gap in their historical knowledge, substituting fiction for fact.

Perhaps no one has gone further to link him or herself to the trappings of American history than Sarah Palin who, while coyly avoiding questions about her potential candidacy for President, undertook a bus tour of historical places as a means of educating Americans about their origins. (Presumably, if people understood American history, they would see the merits in Palin’s political positions) What hubris! The trip backfired, to say the least. Visiting the home of Paul Revere, Palin garbled the story of his ride, contending that Revere road to warn the British rather than the militia. When challenged by Fox News, Palin denied her gaffe, insisting that she “knew her American history.” So ended her tour, if not her presidential ambitions.

Palin is not alone in crafting historical events in accordance with her own political objectives. Speaking to the group Iowans for Tax Relief, Michele Bachmann claimed, for instance, that equality was not something that was contested and fought for, even at the expense of a civil war; rather, as she said, individuals, regardless of their origins, came to the United States and were treated as equals.

Slavery in America

Acknowledging that slavery existed at the time, she contended that the Founding Fathers — especially John Quincy Adams–vowed to work for its elimination. No matter that a number of Founding Fathers–including Washington and Jefferson–were slave owners; that the Constitution counted slaves as three-quarters of a man; or that John Quincy Adams, a young boy at the time, was not a Founding Father.

Even more alarming than these individual cases is the formal rewriting of history, as in the recent case in Texas. Concerned that American textbooks veered too far to the left, the Texas Board of Education (comprised of ten Republicans and five Democrats) unabashedly voted to alter the American narrative to bolster a conservative perspective. Most outlandish of all, the Board voted to discount Thomas Jefferson’s role in providing the philosophical underpinnings of the new Republic, notwithstanding his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. As Fritz Fischer, national chairman of the National Council for History Education characterized it: This should not be a matter of partisanship, but rather of good history.

As George Santayana said, He who forgets history is doomed to repeat it. Might Santayana’s admonition provide a clue as to why Tea Party members, and others of their ilk, seek to distort it? I believe so. In fact, it would appear to me that today’s Conservatives would like nothing more than to return to a semi-mythical past when, according to their lights, life was much simpler, God prevailed, and Government was more circumspect. It’s time for a rereading, not a rewriting, of history.